NATIVE IAUTHORS


INDIGENOUS WRITERS ARE RESHAPING SPECULATIVE FICTION


BY JAMES RING A DAMS M


aggie Hoskie has an un- usual resume for a young Diné (Navajo). She is a Monster-Slayer. A member of the clan Honágháahnii (Walks-Around) and born


of the K’aahanáanii (Living Arrow), she has fic- tional “clan powers” that help her in her work. She has already buried one Immortal alive, beheaded another and dispatched hordes of zombies that resemble golems, monsters made of red clay from Jewish folklore. And that is just what she does in Book One of her Sixth World fantasy series. Hoskie is the creation of Rebecca Roan-


horse (Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo), a rising superstar in the world of fantasy and science fiction or, as some prefer, speculative writing. During the past three years Roanhorse has won every major award in the genre. But she writes from a thoroughly Indigenous view. Her characters live in the Sixth World during the near future, successor to the Fifth World of Diné cosmology, our present. In this post- apocalyptic world, rising sea levels combined with a second New Madrid earthquake have submerged most of the central United States in the Big Water. The Dinétah, the Navajo


8 AMERICAN INDIAN WINTER 2019


homeland, has survived, protected by a vast Wall constructed with the help of the Holy Ones. The cataclysm has summoned back the Diné pantheon, who now live side-by-side with humans and provide Roanhorse with some of her most vivid characters. This blend of traditional and post-


apocalyptic viewpoints works brilliantly in the first two books of the Sixth World series, “Trail of Lightning” and “Storm of Locusts,” (published by Saga Press in 2018 and 2019). However, Roanhorse is by no means the first Native writer to breach the largely Eurocentric world of sci-fi. The venerable Anishinaabe writer and critic Gerald Vizenor set his 1978 picaresque classic “Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles” in a near future of economic collapse. (The date of his pilgrimage, 2034, is the same as the onset of the Big Water, which Roanhorse insists is an eerie coincidence.) Sherman Alexie (Spokane), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguno Pueblo),


Stephen Graham


Jones (Piegan Blackfeet) and Melissa Tanta- quidgeon Zobel (Mohegan) have all written in the “speculative” genre. The University of Arizona Press published


the first anthology of Indigenous science fic- tion (I-sci-fi), “Walking the Clouds,” in 2012.


NVADE SCI-FI


In it, the Anishinaabe scholar Grace L. Dillon identifies five subgenres of what she calls “In- digenous futurisms.” Looking at her themes, the intersection of sci-fi and Native writers makes a lot of sense. “Contact” is a big issue, as seen in the first meeting of humans and aliens as well as the first meeting of Natives, the “Real People” in the tribal perspective, and European aliens. “Native apocalypse” is also frequently depicted, but writers like Roan- horse say that, for the Indigenous inhabitants, the world-changing cataclysm has already happened. “What if I told you there had been a zombie apocalypse?” she asks the dominant culture. “What if I told you that you were the zombies?” In this setting it’s tempting to imag- ine alternate futures and universes, or what Dillon calls the “Native slipstream.” These themes rise from a subconscious


layer of much of the mainstream sci-fi—the encounter of Europe with unknown others. It’s been said, most recently by John Rieder in “Colonialism and the Emergence of Sci- ence Fiction,” that the genre of science fiction, which often features the conquest of alien species and the settling of new worlds, is an emanation of 19th-century colonialism. But sometimes putative guilt inspires writers to


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